shepherds_inn_82503

Posted: 8/22/03

Shepherd's Inn keeper knows her flock well

By George Henson

Staff Writer

PORT ARTHUR–Toni Damian's life is a testament that God can use both the good and the bad in a person's life, given the opportunity.

In Port Arthur, she leads the Shepherd's Inn hospitality house, a place families can stay while visiting loved ones in the federal prison nearby. Damian understands their needs because her husband, Fidel, also is incarcerated there.

Her road to ministry was a long and bumpy one, beginning in the remote Mexican village of Guerrero, between Mexico City and Acapulco.

Her unmarried mother later moved to Mexico City to find work to support her four children, then to California, leaving the children with their grandmother. Her mother worked hard in California, sending back enough money to build her family a brick house and obtain a cow.

In 1985, when Damian was 11, she and her siblings moved to San Diego to live with their mother. “I had no idea what was in front of me,” Damian said.

A good student, she graduated from high school in 1992 but could not attend college because her mother could not afford it. Since she was not a U.S. citizen, she did not qualify for financial aid.

On June 7, 1993, she ran away with her boyfriend, Fidel.

“I knew I was into heavy things, but I didn't care–there were so many pressures at home,” Damian said.

One month later, on July 9, 1993, Fidel was arrested on drug conspiracy charges.

“My mother told me, 'It's summertime; it's only been a month; just come home; no one will know.' But I told her, 'I'm not the same anymore.' I had been with a man. How could I just go home?”

Fidel Damian was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in prison and sent to Texas, to a prison outside Three Rivers.

Although they were not married, she followed him there. They started reading the Catholic Bible together from time to time.

While she knew the Ten Commandments from her catechism, she was particularly struck in her readings by the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.”

“Now I know that it was the Lord speaking to me, but then I didn't know,” she said. “Now I can put together the pieces.”

She soon forgot about the impression that commandment made on her, however.

“It came back to me a couple of months later, though. I went back to Mexico and went to church with a cousin. This church was known for its virgin,” she recalled.

The virgin, a three-foot-high doll dressed in a richly ornamented robe, was ascribed almost magical powers. Parishioners placed money on the robe, or took a handkerchief to rub in on the doll's face and then keep as a kind of talisman.

That reminded Damian of God's prohibition against idols.

She got in the processional line leading to the doll but didn't participate in the ritual.

“When it came my turn, I looked at her with emptiness. My cousin told me that if I didn't do something I would have a curse, but I just turned and left without giving reverence to the virgin or any of the saints,” she said.

Damian returned home to Texas and kept reading the Bible, but she still was “not living a good life,” she said. She knew just enough of God to be afraid of him.

“I knew I was doing wrong things. I thought God would do something bad, devilish to me–put scary faces or something on a tree,” she recounted. “I always said: 'God, not yet. I'm not ready.' I called him 'God' because that is what you call him when you don't know him. When you come to know him, you call him 'Jesus,' 'Lord' and 'Father.'”

She found herself in this remote town between San Antonio and Corpus Christi without friends or family, and she was lonely and afraid.

“When you don't know the Lord, the enemy has you frightened all the time,” she said.

Fidel, still not her husband, was transferred to Port Arthur. He asked around until he found a place she could stay with another inmate's wife in Houston.

There, many of her fears were relieved, but nights were filled with remembrances of the few times she had attended Sunday School at an evangelical church with cousins in California.

“We went only a couple of times, but I remember my cousin crying in church. That wasn't something I was used to seeing. What could be making my cousin cry, I wondered. I said 'God, I want to know why they are doing that, what they were feeling.'”

A few days later–May 3, 1997–a local pastor visited the family she was living with. “He asked me, 'Toni, do you want to accept Jesus into your life?' I said 'yes' without even thinking. It was like asking a kid if he wants candy. I was so excited.

“I was so happy, but I really didn't know what I had done,” she said.

She didn't tell Fidel about her conversion, but he found out from the husband of the woman she was living with, so she started sending Fidel Christian tracts.

Shortly after, she became pregnant while still not married. “I was so ashamed. I said: 'Lord, look at what I've done. You scrubbed me clean, and now I have this big red spot on this white dress you gave me.'”

She continued to go to church and study the Bible.

“I was able to grow,” she recalled. “I was coming to church, studying my Bible, praying, watching preachers on TV. I was eating, eating, eating–just feeding my Spirit all the time. I felt so ashamed about my sin, but I knew I could count on the Lord.”

She prayed God would give her a son so she could have a companion, which she needed since she had moved into an apartment by herself.

God answered her prayer, she said, giving her a son, born with no labor pains whatsoever.

“I was so excited that it was a boy. It was at that time that I felt God had forgiven me. During those nine months, I had been so face down. I had been so depressed, but now I was the old Toni that the Lord had saved 10 months ago. It was almost like I had been saved a second time.”

She taught her son, Isaias, about God as she had promised God she would. One day when they were visiting the prison, Fidel was feeding Isaias while Toni was out of the room. When she came back, Fidel explained that the 2-year-old had refused to eat without praying first.

That started a journey toward Fidel professing faith in Jesus Christ as Savior as well.

“The Lord used Isaias to lead his daddy to the Lord Jesus,” she recalled. On May 8, 2002, she and Fidel finally were married.

She and Isaias moved back to Three Rivers for a while, however.

“I prayed, 'Lord, take me to a church where your word is preached, and where they have a good Sunday School for my son and me,'” she recalled.

That church was First Baptist in Three Rivers, the first Baptist church Damian ever had attended.

“They welcomed me like they would the Lord,” she said.

Feeling a need to be closer to her husband, last December she was a guest at the Shepherd's Inn, a ministry of Golden Triangle Baptist Association, for a week. While there, she overheard a conversation that the missionary serving as resident manager was leaving for another mission endeavor.

“I had been telling the Lord that I wanted to serve him and really had been doing this in Three Rivers–sharing my apartment and meals with people who needed some place to stay. My doors were always open on the weekends to inmate families.”

She was a bit unsure of herself, though. “I thought, this is a ministry; this is not something I'm going to play around with. They need a mature Christian. This is the Lord's ministry, so it would be like working in the boss' office.”

Later, Dion Ainsworth, associate director of missions for the association, brought her an application to fill out. “It wasn't a job history,” she recalled. “It was, 'How long have you known the Lord? Tell us about your Christian walk.'”

She soon had the job of resident manager and has with the help of local churches in the area renovated much of the house in the last six months.

“When I came here as a servant of the Lord, I said, 'Lord, show me what you want me to do.'”

One of the first things her eyes fell upon were the pillows and linens that had become worn, stained and threadbare with use. Damian brought the need to the awareness of women in the local churches. Since then, Woman's Missionary Union groups have made the beds there as nice as their own.

Damian cooks for the 15 to 20 people who stay at the house each weekend as well as the lesser number who are there during the week. They are almost exclusively women and children, and she can identify well.

“Just like people don't want to be around inmates, they don't want to be around inmates' families,” she explained. “But here they can come and be loved.”

Local church members play a key role in expressing that love, she said. “We go through so much as inmate families that we think no one loves us. They ask who buys this–the sofas, the beds, the food, the milk for the babies–and I get to tell them it is the people in the churches.”

Families travel from all over the United States and Mexico to visit inmates in the federal prison. Some have only gas money and stay and eat at Shepherd's Inn at no cost. Others don't even have a car, so they ride a bus to Port Arthur, where Damian becomes their chauffer.

At the Shepherd's Inn, however, the women have a confidant in Damian, who knows their trials as the wives of inmates. She also knows the difference Christ can make in a life.

“I tell them: 'The Lord will be your husband. Put your faith in him; he will supply all your needs,” she said.